The weeks are accelerating.

It’s already Week 4 somehow – I had to double check even when I wrote that to make sure it was true. I can feel time slipping into high gear, and had my first thoughts of our winter trip south creep to mind already. Yes, that’s still months away – but the way the days are zipping by, it may as well be next week.

This week things really felt like a community on the Farm, with a good crew of folks helping keep the plants ahead of entropy and above chaos – lots of weeding and hay mulching, and thousands more ravenous insects sent to their graves slightly earlier than they’d have preferred. The bugs are really numerous this year, thanks to a mild winter that failed to kill off the stupid and slow ones which are normally taken out after not hiding well enough from the freeze.

Fortunately, the two of us have extra time to do bug patrol, while our good helpers’ hands saved parsnips, beets, and squash from weedshade. We also transplanted a bunch of things out into the field – herbs, summer savory, tatsoi, mizuna, chard, collards, Mexican tarragon, and an experimental tobacco crop.

Early in the week, WWOOFer Sarah’s mom, Terri came to visit for a few days, and found field work to be perfectly relaxing – and even an ideal way to spend her birthday! We forced her to play cards with us after the sun went down though. Shareholder Tara also came out, for a second round of helping us with chores and organization and interpersonal communication. Terri and Tara helped make the 5am farmer’s market harvest flow smoothly, and Tara ran the booth with me while Kristin got things done back on the Farm (we’d each separately taken a day away on Thursday and Friday, OMG!)

Although time overall is zooming, the days, individually, seem ridiculously and wonderfully long. Saturday, especially, was intense – with several chapters each worthy of a day in themselves. First harvest, then a busy day at the Market as the heat built up and up – by the time we got home the only sane option was a trip to the River. Knowing a storm was building, we zoomed down valley on the dirt roads to our favorite beach on the Saint Croix … where we unexpectedly ran into a crew of our friends from the Cities!

A couple of hours of floating, chatting, laughing, and drinking later, we emerged reborn, as the clouds piled up and the wind came on with increasing gusto. Knowing the high tunnel was vulnerable to a storm, but left partially open in the steamy sunshine, we reluctantly left the beach and raced back home to batten down the hatches.

We had time to check on the rainwater collection systems, get the non-waterproof things under cover, and watched on the radar as the angry red blotches of potential hail and tornadic winds marched toward us out of the West.

Kristin went to work in the field, where the dry soil made for easy hoeing and weeding (our sandy soil works well for pulling them out with minimal soil coming out with the roots) – she was convinced that if she stopped working because the storm was coming, it wouldn’t actually arrive (more often than not, storm systems split and go right around us it seems), so she just keep slaying weeds as the winds got windier, the skies darkened and began to spit. Thanks to her efforts, the rain didn’t miss us – but neither did the wind! The air became opaque with rain that blew sideways, up, and down.

Trees crashed down in the woods, and lightning showed flashes of hundreds of oak sticks frozen in mid air. I was too enthusiastic about experiencing the storm to shoot videos or photos, even in the aftermath, as we emerged from our tenuous trailer shelter to take stock of the damages. The high tunnel had blown a cord on the southern door, which had allowed wind to burst in – blowing out the north door, knocking a few tomatoes from their trellising, and taking the glass window out of the screen door – relatively minor damage considering what might have been. Some of the Albatross soffit had flown loose, a huge aspen had been set alean over the driveway. The field fared better than I thought it would – the tomatoes out there were held aloft by their trellising, but the rows of peas on the western side of the field took the brunt of the wind’s fury. Other crops were simply bent over or knocked down completely – the garlic, many onions, some pepper plants, even some of the potato plants were bowed to the East, although most of the stems were not actually broken.  Most of the tall sunflowers that we’d allowed to grow up anyplace they weren’t in the way were flattened.

We spent much of Sunday repairing storm damage, with a break to attend the Sterling Old Settlers’ 78^th Annual Picnic, where Neighbor Marcie MCed and local author Lisa Doerr gave a talk about her semi-fictional piece of local history, “Eureka Valley – Grandfathers’ Grandfathers.”

Our order of sweet potato slips (seedlings basically) FINALLY arrived (we’d actually given up on them) … with a very long growing season, it’ll be interesting to see if we can actually get these little babies to produce before the end of the season.

Yesterday, Steffan and Angela returned to the Farm to help out – all day Monday in the field, spending the night, and then getting up for the 6:30 CSA harvest (in an effort to keep everything as tasty and resh as possible, we harvested everything this morning, trying to get all the leafy greens harvested before the sun started heating them up).

With friends like these, who needs arms?

IN THE BOX:

• Weekly Salad Mix – (green & red lettuce, pea tips, baby kale, arugula)-  this might be the last week of spring salad mix, as the lettuce is feeling the heat, growing more bitter and starting to seriously considering going to flower.
• Broccoli – the frozen plants are still producing side shoots that are as big as their initial main heads were – plus, we replanted new ones post freeze, which have done well.

• Sugar Snap Peas – spring field candy! The only vegetable from the field that Widget not only eats, but actually demands … she knows when we’re harvesting them, and never fails to show up to beg for some to snack on.
• Snow Peas (large shares only) – can also be eaten raw, but most folks seem to love to stir-fry them.
• Spring onions
• Turnips – We thought it would be easy to tell the sweeter Hakuri salad turnips (which are delicious on their own and raw) from the more traditional-tasting variety we planted (probably ideal for roasting), since they were called “Gold Ball.” However, they’re not that different looking – the “gold” is more of a slightly off-white, compared to the whiter Hakuris. You can try to puzzle it out or just treat them all the same! There are enough in the box this week to make a good dish with them roasted.
• Turnip greens are a staple dish in the south – many people eat them with darn near every meal, and they’re a side dish option at almost every restaurant down there. That being said, I know we’re in the Northland here, and most of us aren’t used to eating or cooking them! They’re very good for you, and can be quite tasty – but you might not get it right on your first try (Cole).You can eat them now, or freeze them til winter, when they’re great to add into soups – they lend their nutrition to the broth readily.

• Beets & Beet Greens – There are more beets coming later, but this is all Kristin is willing to let go of from the experimental early high tunnel planting … sorry there aren’t a lot, but try grating it over a salad to make it purty perhaps! The greens are awesome – basically like Swiss chard.
• Cauliflower (large shares only – very little of them did well for us!)
• Cilantro
• Tea herbs (anise hyssop, mint, lemon balm, red clover) – great for hot tea, ice tea, sun tea, or muddled and spiked with booze!

Everyone sings about the first week of summer, but that’s next time – this was the final week of Spring.

The transition was celestially marked upon Wolf Creek Wisconsin (and elsewhere, less relevantly) by some of the longest daylight hours of the year – an opportunity to work from dusk til dawn in the most productive imaginable manner. This is the kind of holiday Kristin can really get behind, and she worked for damn near 15 hours straight, into the dusk, leading a shifting crew of helpers in a huge push to get all the warm weather crops weeded and mulched. I joined in for the morning and evening – during the afternoon, I helped Jim help us build a deck.

This mighty edifice will be the base for the screen porch we picked up free off Craigslist 2 years ago – great for hanging out, relaxing, eating at a table like a civilized human, and for surviving berserker biting insect periods.

Speaking of insects, we squished many more bugs this week in the field. We’ve specialized into different prey; Kristin took out squash bugs and cucumber beetles, while I began the hunt for squash vine borer eggs and popped hundreds of loathsome potato beetle grubs (and a dwindling number of the full grown crunchy adults).

It was another week of good help and lots getting done.

We had a kick butt new WWOOFer (Sarah and her smart pup, “Kingsbury” … named after the town she got him in – and where we met her in over the winter) and friends and family joining forces with us to stay ahead of the bugs and weeds and weather.

Saturday was the first farmers’ market we’ve gone to this Spring – by waking up around 5:00 we had time to arrive early, after harvesting, washing, drying, weighing, tying, bagging, and packing everything up.

Today’s harvest went smoothly, after a scrambling start to get all the various leafy greens harvested before the sun started hitting them – this maintains peak fresh flavor, but requires some real hustle at a time most of us would much rather be hitting a snooze button. After being taken from the ground, we put the harvested goods into our three vintage chest freezers – these are not powered, but serve as giant coolers. On harvest days we stock them with bottles of ice, which we keep in a chest freezer that our lovely neighbors let us run in their barn. If they’ve been out in the sun, we hydro-cool most crops as quickly as possible after harvest, by soaking them in our chilly well water. This slows entropy and preserves freshness by pulling out the “field heat” – which would otherwise start breaking the tissue down quickly after being picked.

BOX #3

• End of Spring Salad Mix – Lettuces, arugula, mache (corn salad), pea tips, baby beet greens, mizuna, and sunflower greens.
  
• Turnips & Turnip Greens – Some are mild and good to eat raw, others have a radishlike spice, which you can cook out of them if you’re not into that.
• Peas (Sugar snap and snow pea mix) – Two types – the sweeter, plumper pods, as well as the flatter snow peas. Both types are edible raw and plain, or can be cooked – great for stir fries. Some people “de-string” them before eating by pulling off the fibrous string on both sides. I just chew em up myself!

• Braising Greens Mix (Swiss chard, Collards, Dino kale, Red Russian kale, and Curly Blue kale) –  a mix of large greens that you cook! Some folks cut out the bg stems, others dice the stems up fine and the leaves chunkier.
  
  
• Cilantro – God I love this stuff. Hated it as a kid, thought it tasted like soap – but now I want to fill my whole taco with it.
  
  
• Dill – Kristin made a very tasty salad dressing by chopping up some dill and adding it to vinegar with salt and pepper early in the day, and then oil just before serving.  OR you could put it on a potato. Or eggs. Ya know.
  
  
• Broccoli – large shares only (very limited supply due to that damn May 15th Freeze )

This week, we bodyguarded baby plants.

The day after last week’s CSA harvest, we began to weed.

Weeding is calm, satisfying and meditative work – remarkably enjoyable for a repetitious task. Satisfying moment to moment, and to look back down a row and see a clean row of nothing but crops, and later, satisfying to see those plants flourish and shoot up once freed from competition from wild and wily weeds.

We methodically deleted the vigorous weeds that had sprung up in a thick climbing canopy over any and every unmulched place. Our fingers traced backward along the cords of bindweed, along grasping twining feelers to the base of the stem, and popped them out by the roots, Ragweed,smartweed, lambs quarter and grasses were plucked up and left laying on the mulched walkways, no longer spreading shadow over the soil. Row by row, foot by foot, pluck by pluck, we brought the emerging little seedlings back into the open sunlight they needed.  That sun grew hot and hammering.

We watered  where we weeded; bare soil dries out readily. Our skin scorched and sometimes burned; we swam in the River. Eventually, clouds blocked the sun… but the heat and humidity remained. We sweated into the dirt in the grayness while we weeded.

Sometimes, I machine weeded – tilling as close as I dared to the plants, and weedwhipping the fenceline (where weeds love to ascend along the chickenwire and touch the lowest wire in the electric fence, allowing the fence’s zap to be diffused into the ground).

But not all our protective efforts were based upon being organic human herbicides – the second half of the week, we found ourselves spending just as much intensity into being organic human pesticides. Getting pesticidal. Committing mass pesticide.

When you grow organically, there are limited options for dealing with bugs that want to devour and destroy your crops. The option we rely almost exclusively upon is hand picking / bug squishing.

It was a mild winter, which works out well for certain bug populations.

There are swarms of leaf-eating, root-nibblng, disease-spreading cucumber beetles, eating not only the cucumber plants you’d expect them to, but also the squash, the melons, and the zucchini.  Cucumber beetles are tricky ones to squish – they are small, fast, and quick to take flight when approached.We got better at snatching them quickly between finger and thumb and grinding them up, ideally with a bit of sandy soil. We can only hope to put a dent in their numbers, prevent some eggs from being laid. There are always more, but it does seem there are less every trip.

WEEK 2 BOX:

• Spring Salad Mix 2: Red & green lettuce, pea tips, spinach, baby kale, green and red mizuna, arugula, and some lambs quarter (aka “wild spinach”).

• Purslane – this is a succulent edible garden weed – we don’t plant it, but we don’t weed it much – allowing it to grow and spread. It can be cooked but we prefer it raw. Can eat the leaves and the stems as well, although you’ll likely want to chop those up finely. We have enjoyed the crunchy, tart, lemony flavor on sandwiches and in relish. It’s said to be good in pesto but we haven’t tried that yet ourselves. Purslane is more nutritious than unicorn milk.
• Cilantro – Would go well with the green onions in a salsa, or in a dip, If you want to make a cilantro dip, do it now – this is the most cilantro we’ll get from the field until fall’s second crop comes in.
• Sweet Basil – This harvest was a salvage operation – the dread Basil Downy Mildew critters found us right away this year, and we had to take out all the basil we’d planted. Perhaps some of the new planting coming next will fare better …
• Broccoli – a little cute bag of broccoli. As mentioned previously, we had an unexpected late freeze put quite a hurting on our cool weather crops. Many of the broccoli plants managed to survive in spite of losing almost all their leaves … however, they went straight to work forming flower heads the moment the had a few leaves.So the plants and the broccoli are small – but tender and delicious! I’m grateful to have gotten anything from them after the beating they took … so much time and work went into those plants, and while it’s too bad they won’t be providing much return, getting anything at all feels like a positive thing after thinking all were dead!
• Radishes – better eating quality than last week, thanks to a better weather mix leading up to harvest
• Radish Greens – try to use them within the frst couple of days for best results! See last week’s newsletter for some ideas on that … but don’t try eating them raw I’ll repeat!
• Green Onion – aka scallions – the tops are mild, the white bottoms more potent.
• a Garlic Scape – It’s the curly thing bundled with your onions! You can use this garlc flower like a scallion, chop them into salads or as a topping.

• Zippy Sprouts (large shares only) – Grown with special secret powers by Neighbor Marcia – sprouted clover, fenugreek, radish, broccoli, alfalfa

 

      

Photos from the Harvest (thanks Nora!)

CSA BOX #1

Some general storage info – twist/fold plastic bags to keep things from desiccating. Use the crisper drawer in your fridge – it maintains humidity better than the rest of the fridge. Actually, let’s save me some typing- here’s a link to some good info on storage.

• Spring Salad Mix – Red Ruby lettuce, Waltman’s green lettuce, pea tips, arugula, baby kale, green & red mizuna (red is a bit spicy).  If you’re like me, dig in as it comes – if you prefer smaller and neater bites, chop it up just before eating.
• Orange Marmalade – When we were down south this winter WWOOFing on other farms, we spotted an ad on Craiglist for free oranges – a guy had a tree in his yard that produced super abundantly, but he was unable to harvest them – so we went over armed with several empty boxes, climbed up, and got to work transforming his burden into dozens of jars of preserves to bring North to share. (Please return the jar when it’s all gone!)

• Radishes –  Tasty zingballs in your salad, whole or sliced. If you’re not a fan of that radish zing, you can roast them to create a mild side dish, with a flavor similar to roasted rutabaga or turnips – perhaps you’ll find that roasted radishes are the vegetable that’s missing from your life!
  
  
• Radish Greens – Don’t try to eat them raw: that’s gross (unless you blend them into pesto). Don’t be intimidated by the size of the bag – you’re going to cook these down, like veggie shrinky-dinks. Being a good CSA member means learning to cook greens and love it: fact. We didn’t eat many cooked greens before we started the farm, but they’re now a large part of our diet and it’s awesome. They hold sauces and flavors really well, taste great, and are as nutritious than the roots they’re plucked from. Ways we’ve enjoyed them: chopped up with beans, in soup, sauteed in butter or bacon fat, with soy sauce, garlic … or green onions! We usually sautee them only lightly to maintain more of the green nature, especially since they’re not that tough. (We washed and spun them for you, but you might want to rinse them one more time because these leaves tend to hold onto grit better than most.) Here are some idears to consider.

• Green Onions – The green tops are milder, good to use fresh or add at the very end of cooking. Good in salad dressing, on eggs, or as garnish on a baked potato. The white part has a stronger onion flavor, and can be used anywhere you’d use regular onion.
• Oregano – We threw a couple of sprigs in – use it to flavor a salad dressing or on eggs …
• Free range eggs (large shares only) – Our flock spends most of every day foraging in the woods, begging for scraps, jostling with Widget for dominance in the animal pecking order, and learning to jump up and eat from our hands. They’ve got it pretty good, and we love their antics – we don’t have a TV, but we have plenty of entertainment watching the Chicken Show go down all around us.

Oh, and that pre-season dread I mentioned at the beginning? It’s gone, replaced by a mix of excitement, pride, satisfaction, and even awe – it’s ON, we’re doing it, and it’s beautiful.

Hell. Yeah.

It’s gonna be a great year.